Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata completes today its glorious journey of 43rd years. The journey has been quite long and therefore, it is high time for a retrospection. Forty three years back when it was founded, it took certain pledges. It promised to preserve the artistic and cultural heritage of India on the one hand and on the other, it also assured to promote the visual and performing arts. The Academy maintains a wonderful museum with a huge collection of traditional and contemporary art. The collection of this museum has been an on going process and every year it is being enriched with the additional of unique and rare collections. Though we feel that much has been done in this regards but even then, there is much more there to do.

Among the various other activities, the Academy organises a number of exhibitions in its galleries to bring together the significant works of our country’s contemporary artists established or yet to be discovered. However, the organization of an Annual Exhibition every year in the month of January has been the biggest activity of our Academy. This year about one thousand artists extended their participation from all over India. However, owing to the paucity of space, we could display the works of about four hundred artists and these are presented in the five galleries of our Academy. This 43rd Annual Exhibition of the Academy has been a huge affair and one can witness in this the latest scenario of contemporary Indian art practiced in different parts of India. The exhibition includes a number of works of such upcoming artists who enlisted their names in the competitive section. In the competitive section, the Academy every year offers six awards in six categories of art. This year eight out standing young artists are awarded as in the categories of Sculpture and Graphics, the awards are shared. The Academy also assured to sponsor an exhibition in near future with the works of these awardees. This is done first to give these upcoming and talented artists a platform to show their expertise and talents.

This huge exhibition is like a feast that awaits your discerning eyes. The exhibition includes fascinating compositions in all mediums of art and it opens up a colorful panorama of the hopes and despair, life and time, resolve and resurrection of our artists as an outcome of their conscious, subconscious and super conscious minds.

This unique exhibition lays bare numbers of pleasing figurative compositions. Equally exciting are the compositions in abstract expressions. Curiously enough, the abstractions in some of these works, to my mind, look more real than reality itself.